Choose what goes in the hall.
You are founding a lunar city on the rim of Shackleton crater — near-constant sun for the array field, and the permanently shadowed floor below holding the water ice the whole Artemis program is chasing. Zone ground for people to live and work in, run roads to keep it serviced, and the city grows itself: you are not placing finished buildings, you are setting the conditions for density to rise on its own.
Drag out Habitation, Trade or Industrial zoning over open ground. Each tile inside develops independently, advancing through five stages of density as long as it is serviced by a road reaching the Command Module, demand for that zone type is positive, and the land value underneath it — terrain, hazard proximity, closeness to a grow hall — supports it. Losing the road connection for too long costs a tile its density, the same way real neglect would.
Habitation wants jobs to outrun population. Trade and Industry each want population to outrun their own capacity. Zone only housing and nobody has anywhere to work; zone only industry and nobody is there to staff it. A city that grows evenly needs all three.
The Grow Hall tool works exactly like Lunar Farm: drag out a hall, plant one crop across the whole footprint, tend it, harvest it. It is the one building that feeds the colony directly rather than developing on its own — the same closed-loop farming this city grew out of.
The survey has already found regolith, ice and helium-3 out there — the Tile panel shows what is under your cursor. A Mining Rig only sits on surveyed ground and draws from whatever is there; an ISRU plant cracks water out of stockpiled ice. Once you have a yard worth shipping, raise the Launch Pad and launch: it loads helium-3 first, then regolith, then any real food surplus, and converts the payload to credits on a cooldown — a rocket to Earth, same as the real cadence.
The Colony tab tracks a straight answer to "is this actually working": a day counts as self-sufficient when the grid held without browning out, the larder has more than five days of food ahead of it, and the zoned districts brought in more than they cost to run. Hold that for ten straight days and the charter records it. Auto-Manage City and Auto-Manage Expansion both chase the same goal once established — each throttles its own kind of growth (zoning for City, survey charter and the export economy for Expansion) once the books are trending backwards, rather than spending the founding stash down slower.
Colony-wide equipment, bought once rather than placed on a tile — dust shielding for the arrays, a lighting retrofit for the grow halls, better water recovery, blast shielding against flares and moonquakes, self-tending grow halls, and harder drill bits for every mining rig already sunk. Free under Free Mode, same as everything else.
Free Mode waives every cost, for experimenting with layouts. Disasters toggles the random-event deck — solar flares, micrometeorite strikes, moonquakes and the rest — off by default; flip it on for a harder run. Auto-Manage City hands day-to-day operations — colony alerts, farming, power, roads, zoning — to a director. Auto-Manage Expansion hands it the survey charter and the mining/ISRU/launch economy instead. The two are independent: run either alone, both together for a fully hands-off colony, or neither for full manual control.
An original game, in the spirit of Maxis' SimCity 2000 (1993) but sharing no code or art with it — the simulation, rendering and every number here are written from scratch. It continues directly from Lunar Farm: the crop roster, soil-conditioning mechanic and closed-loop life support are the same, just one zone among several now.